On 18 Jan 2017 13:07:28 +0000 (GMT), Theo
wrote:

She has a point about electric bikes though. In China, they're everywhere.
You can buy them in the supermarket for a few hundred dollars. Here,
they're sold by bijou little bike shops for near a thousand pounds. Or two
or three times that if you buy from a brand name or they manage to sell you
an electric mountain bike.

Even in Cambridge there is basically one shop dedicated to (expensive)
electric bikes, and a few of the others have a derisory two-thousand-pound
example. And there's a busy bike hire market, but nobody hired electric
that I could find when I looked recently.

Electric bikes have become quite common here in Norway. Some import
cheap kits from China and retrofit their existing bike.

--
jhk